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Zipline is the world's largest autonomous drone delivery service, operating across four continents and completing millions of deliveries of blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products. The company has flown over 140 million commercial autonomous miles and partners with healthcare systems, governments, retailers, and global businesses.
As Head of Service Delivery, Africa, you will oversee Zipline's growing network of distribution sites across Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, and Côte d'Ivoire as the network expands rapidly. You will ensure every site is operationally ready at handover and maintains high performance thereafter.
Key responsibilities include:
- Writing and owning the operating standards library for the African network, consolidating existing practices into one clear standard across all sites
- Certifying every site at go-live and quarterly thereafter, publishing results
- Leading Country Operations & Product Leads in each major market, who report to you and work with Country Directors
- Defining competency standards for Site Leads and Shift Team Leads, building a pipeline to produce ~20 new certified Site Leads for launch programs
- Publishing capacity envelopes for each site based on flight operations constraints and real data
- Defining operating metrics for all sites, agreeing targets with Country Directors, and holding teams accountable
- Owning network operating data including monthly site reporting and cross-site comparisons
- Serving as Engineering's primary operations partner for field issues, standardization, and product requests
- Building strong relationships with Country Directors to support them with standards, data, and coaching
Success will be measured by rising certification pass rates, quick closure of findings, accurate capacity envelopes, rapid competency development of new Site Leads, consistent metrics across sites, and narrowing performance gaps month-over-month.
You will report to the Head of Operations, Africa, and work alongside the Heads of Deployments and Logistics as part of the regional leadership team.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 12+ years running distributed physical operations to a written standard (e.g., airline ground operations, multi-site logistics networks, industrial or franchise operations, healthcare networks)
- Proven experience building a standards and certification system from scratch, not just inheriting one
- Experience leading through country or regional leads with dotted-line authority and reputation as outstanding cross-functional partner
- Track record of building operator talent pipelines at scale
- Strong data instincts: setting clear metrics, using operating data to spot variance, holding teams accountable
- Strong programme and project management instincts: driving workstreams end-to-end across teams you don't directly lead
